The Fault in Our Stars

departure, and then two tremendous jet engines roared to life and we began to accelerate.
“This is what it feels like to drive in a car with you,” I said, and he smiled, but kept his
jaw clenched tight and I said, “Okay?”
We were picking up speed and suddenly Gus’s hand grabbed the armrest, his eyes
wide, and I put my hand on top of his and said, “Okay?” He didn’t say anything, just
stared at me wide-eyed, and I said, “Are you scared of flying?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said. The nose of the plane rose up and we were aloft.
Gus stared out the window, watching the planet shrink beneath us, and then I felt his hand
relax beneath mine. He glanced at me and then back out the window. “We are flying,” he
announced.
“You’ve never been on a plane before?”
He shook his head. “LOOK!” he half shouted, pointing at the window.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I see it. It looks like we’re in an airplane.”
“NOTHING HAS EVER LOOKED LIKE THAT EVER IN ALL OF HUMAN
HISTORY,” he said. His enthusiasm was adorable. I couldn’t resist leaning over to kiss
him on the cheek.
“Just so you know, I’m right here,” Mom said. “Sitting next to you. Your mother.
Who held your hand as you took your first infantile steps.”
“It’s friendly,” I reminded her, turning to kiss her on the cheek.
“Didn’t feel too friendly,” Gus mumbled just loud enough for me to hear. When
surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically
Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist.
It was a quick flight to Detroit, where the little electric car met us as we disembarked and
drove us to the gate for Amsterdam. That plane had TVs in the back of each seat, and once
we were above the clouds, Augustus and I timed it so that we started watching the same
romantic comedy at the same time on our respective screens. But even though we were
perfectly synchronized in our pressing of the play button, his movie started a couple
seconds before mine, so at every funny moment, he’d laugh just as I started to hear
whatever the joke was.
* * *
Mom had this big plan that we would sleep for the last several hours of the flight, so when
we landed at eight
A.M
., we’d hit the city ready to suck the marrow out of life or whatever.
So after the movie was over, Mom and Augustus and I all took sleeping pills. Mom
conked out within seconds, but Augustus and I stayed up to look out the window for a
while. It was a clear day, and although we couldn’t see the sun setting, we could see the

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sky’s response.
“God, that is beautiful,” I said mostly to myself.
“‘The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes,’” he said, a line from An Imperial
Affliction.
“But it’s not rising,” I said.
“It’s rising somewhere,” he answered, and then after a moment said, “Observation: It
would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could chase the sunrise around the
world for a while.”
“Also I’d live longer.” He looked at me askew. “You know, because of relativity or
whatever.” He still looked confused. “We age slower when we move quickly versus
standing still. So right now time is passing slower for us than for people on the ground.”
“College chicks,” he said. “They’re so smart.”
I rolled my eyes. He hit his (real) knee with my knee and I hit his knee back with
mine. “Are you sleepy?” I asked him.
“Not at all,” he answered.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me neither.” Sleeping meds and narcotics didn’t do for me what they
did for normal people.
“Want to watch another movie?” he asked. “They’ve got a Portman movie from her
Hazel Era.”
“I want to watch something you haven’t seen.”
In the end we watched 300, a war movie about 300 Spartans who protect Sparta from
an invading army of like a billion Persians. Augustus’s movie started before mine again,
and after a few minutes of hearing him go, “Dang!” or “Fatality!” every time someone
was killed in some badass way, I leaned over the armrest and put my head on his shoulder
so I could see his screen and we could actually watch the movie together.
300 featured a sizable collection of shirtless and well-oiled strapping young lads, so it
was not particularly difficult on the eyes, but it was mostly a lot of sword wielding to no
real effect. The bodies of the Persians and the Spartans piled up, and I couldn’t quite
figure out why the Persians were so evil or the Spartans so awesome. “Contemporaneity,”
to quote AIA, “specializes in the kind of battles wherein no one loses anything of any
value, except arguably their lives.” And so it was with these titans clashing.
Toward the end of the movie, almost everyone is dead, and there is this insane
moment when the Spartans start stacking the bodies of the dead up to form a wall of
corpses. The dead become this massive roadblock standing between the Persians and the
road to Sparta. I found the gore a bit gratuitous, so I looked away for a second, asking
Augustus, “How many dead people do you think there are?”
He dismissed me with a wave. “Shh. Shh. This is getting awesome.”
When the Persians attacked, they had to climb up the wall of death, and the Spartans
were able to occupy the high ground atop the corpse mountain, and as the bodies piled up,

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the wall of martyrs only became higher and therefore harder to climb, and everybody
swung swords/shot arrows, and the rivers of blood poured down Mount Death, etc.
I took my head off his shoulder for a moment to get a break from the gore and
watched Augustus watch the movie. He couldn’t contain his goofy grin. I watched my
own screen through squinted eyes as the mountain grew with the bodies of Persians and
Spartans. When the Persians finally overran the Spartans, I looked over at Augustus again.
Even though the good guys had just lost, Augustus seemed downright joyful. I nuzzled up
to him again, but kept my eyes closed until the battle was finished.
As the credits rolled, he took off his headphones and said, “Sorry, I was awash in the
nobility of sacrifice. What were you saying?”
“How many dead people do you think there are?”
“Like, how many fictional people died in that fictional movie? Not enough,” he
joked.
“No, I mean, like, ever. Like, how many people do you think have ever died?”
“I happen to know the answer to that question,” he said. “There are seven billion
living people, and about ninety-eight billion dead people.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d thought that maybe since population growth had been so fast, there
were more people alive than all the dead combined.
“There are about fourteen dead people for every living person,” he said. The credits
continued rolling. It took a long time to identify all those corpses, I guess. My head was
still on his shoulder. “I did some research on this a couple years ago,” Augustus continued.
“I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and
assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living
people to remember all the dead people?”
“And are there?”
“Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we’re disorganized mourners, so a
lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one ends up remembering the
person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about.”
“Yeah,” I said.
It was quiet for a minute, and then he asked, “You want to read or something?” I said
sure. I was reading this long poem called Howl by Allen Ginsberg for my poetry class, and
Gus was rereading An Imperial Affliction.
After a while he said, “Is it any good?”
“The poem?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, it’s great. The guys in this poem take even more drugs than I do. How’s AIA?”
“Still perfect,” he said. “Read to me.”
“This isn’t really a poem to read aloud when you are sitting next to your sleeping

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mother. It has, like, sodomy and angel dust in it,” I said.
“You just named two of my favorite pastimes,” he said. “Okay, read me something
else then?”
“Um,” I said. “I don’t have anything else?”
“That’s too bad. I am so in the mood for poetry. Do you have anything memorized?”
“‘Let us go then, you and I,’” I started nervously, “‘When the evening is spread out
against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.’”
“Slower,” he said.
I felt bashful, like I had when I’d first told him of An Imperial Affliction. “Um, okay.
Okay. ‘Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of
restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: /
Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an
overwhelming question . . . / Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” / Let us go and make our
visit.’”
“I’m in love with you,” he said quietly.
“Augustus,” I said.
“I am,” he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes
crinkling. “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple
pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout
into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will
come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow
the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
“Augustus,” I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was
rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn’t say it back. I
couldn’t say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded,
lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

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